Wrong tool for what? And what would you consider as alternative tools?

Santander, you have to be more forthcoming with what you want and what you don't want. You wanted a free database, but you didn't specify that you didn't want to deal with DBI (hence, I am assuming, SQL). So, various wise monks recommended SQLite, and one even recommended DBD-CSV, but they all seem to not meet your requirements. These kinds of questions are not very helpful and waste everyone's effort.

You also say that you want a "freeware database PERL SCRIPT." What do you want... a database, or a script?

What do you exactly want to do? From your original post it seems that your text file is doing the work for you quite well, isn't it? 8847 rows, 10 columns are peanuts for a decent computer and Perl... no one will even know there is any processing going on. And since you also mentioned "Correct/update items online is not necessary" (whatever that means), a text file would be fine for you. Perl can happily munch through few tens of thousands of lines of text without any problems. If you start running into speed issues, you can think of converting to BerkeleyDB, but you haven't specified upfront if that is too "abtract" for you.

Ask mostly exactly what you want, and also check out a recent article on perl.com regarding embedded databases.